Herd immunity is pretty important.

The first of the crazy parents who went anti-vax benefitted greatly from Herd immunity. Now enough of them are not vaccinating that the herd immunity is basically non-existent. So we get things like measles outbreaks.

There are people who are medically incapable of getting vaccinated, like those with compromised immune systems (some might be in treatment for cancer)… And their best defense is if all of us, who can be immunized, are immunized.

Cancer treatments are not the only immunocompromising thing that can happen and not all immunocompromised people have cancer specifically… For the record.

Anyone who is anti-vax should be aware that they are actively and intentionally putting other people at risk and that should be strongly and thoroughly documented; so when they bring in a cold/flu/COVID/measles/whatever preventable disease to the school and someone else’s kid dies as a result the grieving family has the ability to sue them into poverty.

They deserve worse, but legally, I can’t condone that… But if someone wanted to take a page from a particular person named Luigi, I would be hard pressed to find a good reason to pursue any charges against them.

Interestingly, I have some nurses in the family and the rate at which people who are educated in healthcare, are anti-vax, is too damned high.

Which isn’t to imply its a lot of people, but any nonzero amount of people, working in healthcare, who buy into anti-vax propaganda, is too many. You’ve been formally taught about this stuff. Yet, you’re anti-vax because some person on Facebook/Twitter/whatever, fed you some bullshit about the “dangers”?? Wow. What the actual fuck.

My recommendation is to maybe get some electrical safe tools, possibly some gloves that insulate against shocks, but definitely a good non-contact voltage detector, or NCV.

Check the circuit with your NCV before turning off the power, before working on the things on the circuit, and after turning on the power when you’re done (before you switch anything on). It helps keep you and your house from halting or catching fire.

… And always connect ground wires first.

Good luck.

Fair enough.

If you’re not an EE or a nerd (like me), then it might as well be black magic.

Powerline adapters are fun here tho. They work great if you’re not crossing the split phase, otherwise they suck… A lot.

I’m not an EE. I apologize if I gave that impression. I just have an obsession with understanding anything I use on a regular basis, whether computers, smartphones, electricity, vehicles… Anything that does stuff, and I use it, I want to know how it does the thing that it does.

I’m weird like that.

I learned a lot from “Electrician U” on YouTube, along with a few others. Maybe worth a look. The scientific/physics side of things was more from watching other YouTubers (as to why it behaves the way it does), along with a fundamental knowledge that I learned from doing amateur radio stuff. Working in IT and having to deal with the power requirements of systems and making sure that we won’t blow a breaker under load… That helped motivate me to learn.

It all came to a head when we were deploying a network and server for a business that was still in construction of the facility. The electrician was going to run a temp line for our stuff so we could set up and be ready for opening day, and he asked how many amps we needed… I did a bit of a deep dive to figure out an answer for him, and I’ve been learning more and more since then.

Oh this gets stranger.

It’s usually 120v, but I’m not going to split hairs over 10v.

So, 120v is not a voltage that is delivered from the grid… Technically speaking. Each home is given one circuit of 240v, which is usually part of one leg of a three phase, coming off of the Transformers… 120v is there because they center-tap the transformer. This halves the voltage by consequence. Inside the house the circuits are generally laid out to try to balance the load between each half of the 240v phase.

The idea is that two 120v loads, put in series, will total 240v. So power will ideally go from L1 to a 120v load, to “neutral”, then over to another 120v load, then finally back on L2.

More or Less.

120v is basically just half of what you should be loading the system with.

The center tap neutral from the transformer is to collect any load imbalance between L1 and L2 to allow for the two “sides” of the phase to be out of balance and still work.

The US “plug” ( aka receptacle ) is a NEMA 5-15R, or NEMA 5-20R (for 20A); these are designed for 120v operation using the half phase described above. Of course, you can mis-wire it and make all kinds of dangerous abominations if you so choose. There is, however, a less known NEMA 6-15R and NEMA 6-20R that is basically the same, but for 240v operation, replacing the neutral wire with L2 instead (and 15/20A respectively).

So it is entirely possible to have 240v outlets in a North American home, while still being compliant with code.

It’s actually really fascinating information when your dig into it.

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

We wanted to do it this year on our anniversary, which was about a month ago now, but there was too much going on financially that even throwing a modest party with the budget constraints was going to create problems. We both had job disruptions in the last months of 2024, and things have just been a bit to hard financially to really bother.

We’re starting to save for next year already. Planning shall begin soon.

My partner and I are similar to you. We couldn’t care less. I proposed to her, she said yes, we’re happy with the way things are, nothing needed to change.

However. Legally speaking, when you get married, you are considered as a single legal entity in many things including court/law enforcement/taxes.

A person cannot be compelled to bear witness to their partners actions in court, in the USA, that’s the fifth amendment, in Canada, it’s section 11© of the charter of rights and freedoms. The basic concept being that you have the right to remain silent (and not incriminate yourself).

While I don’t plan on doing any crime or anything… That’s a nice perk.

Also, she hates doing her taxes, so when we’re married, I can do taxes for both of us.

There’s very few perks here and bluntly, it’s not worth the cost…

We’re going to elope and just throw a “reception” (party) afterwards.

Oh, I agree. I’m right there with you.

I was specifically addressing butthurt white males.

I, personally, couldn’t give a shit what race/gender anyone is, they’re a living human deserving of respect, the kind that isn’t demonstrated by the asshole in the subject comic.

The only reason I’m calling out white males, specifically those that feel butthurt by the comic and have no sense of humor, is because the previous poster specifically cited that group. I’m a member of the white/male group, so I wanted to speak bluntly “man to man” style to any future visitors. Oh my, there are so many issues with referring to it that way; I’m just going to leave it and hope it comes across correctly.

In any case, anyone, regardless of their race, or gender or anything else you can classify people using, has different behaviors or thinks differently (better or worse) about others based on gender/race/whatever, then they’re an asshole.

I will judge others based on the content of their character. That doesn’t make me better than anyone else, I’m only stating my intent. If the content of your character is trash, then I will judge you for the trash you are. If you’re trying to do right, despite falling/failing sometimes, then thats worthy of more consideration than the trash humans mentioned earlier.

I couldn’t possibly give any fewer fucks what color your skin is, or what you have in your pants. Be whatever you want to be, just don’t be an asshole.

As a white male, I’m not going to disagree with you on any of this.

Related to the content: personally I like opinionated, loud mouthed women. I don’t classify myself as a “high value” male or anything. I mean, who the fuck is that arrogant? I’m not poor, but I’m certainly not rich. I’m much closer to being poor than I am to being rich… But that doesn’t say much.

In any case, the content is funny. It’s an exaggeration of the kind of reaction that people tend to have to dickwads sharing their unsolicited opinions with strangers who don’t care what you think.

I love that it is shining a big fat spotlight on the shitty behaviors that self proclaimed “high value men” think is ok. It’s not ok. Stop it. Get some help.

It’s shameful to share a gender with these degenerates. I am ashamed of my gender because people like the one depicted in the comic, exist. And they’re not a trivial amount either. There’s a good number of them, and it’s fucking embarrassing.

To anyone butthurt about the contents of the comic: first, relax, it’s a joke. Second, how about you treat everyone like they’re a fucking human being? Instead of putting people into little boxes like “high value” or “male” or “female” or whatever, how about you throw all that bullshit out and just see humans. Regardless of race, gender, preferences, religion, anatomical features, disabilities… They’re all human beings deserving of some measure of respect. And don’t give me any shit about “respect is earned”… Fuck you. You need to have a basic level of respect before you can prove yourself as someone deserving of respect; otherwise any action you take will be seen as the feeble flailings of someone nobody cares about to earn some kind of clout.

Everyone should be given a base level of respect until they prove that the respect granted to them for being a human in our society, isn’t deserved.

For everyone else who may still be reading and didn’t get butthurt by a comic: stay frosty.

I suppose it depends on where you live …

I mean, the same can be said for “new” teams.

Though… “Teams classic” was an electron app, and I’m not sure that’s better.

Outlook “classic”, as far as I’m concerned, is the last actual email client program that Microsoft will make. From here on out, it’s all webapps.

Honestly, so much of their stuff runs in a web browser that you might as well just just google apps… It also negates any requirement to run their bloated shitware OS.

Time will tell, if nothing else.

I think the tech has merit, but not nearly to the extent that companies are investing into it right now.

It’s moving so fast that it’s going to be hard to curb it when things start going wrong.

Here comes sky net? I guess?

I don’t mind people using it for boiler plate stuff, and/or rough drafts to get a lot of the words typed out, so you can editorialize what’s there.

When doing a lot of similar things, it can save a ton of time just having someone or something draw up a draft/starting point.

Any uses beyond this, are a non-starter for me when it comes to actual business use cases. The information that AI spits out in response to a query, is not, and should not be considered to be, complete in any way, shape, or form. It absolutely will need to be reviewed, edited, checked for accuracy and finalized by a human, before it is ready to be submitted for others to ingest. Zero AI content should be sent to anyone else until it has been reviewed and fully vetted by the person using AI to generate the content.

This has not been the goal to date. A lot of AI is trying to essentially eliminate entire segments of job markets, and bluntly, it’s an insane mistake to think that, especially in its current form, that it could possibly do that, or even come close in any capacity.

It’s at best a first-draft machine, but more likely it’s a novelty that isn’t worth the risk of using in production.

That’s fair.

I apologize to the parrot community. Clearly parrots are better than what we currently call AI.

From the wording, it looks like they’re just going to georestrict their content to places that are not Turkey.

Far from a problem, unless of course, your primary following is from Turkey; or that’s where you live.

I don’t blame bluesky here, they operate internationally, and they have to obey the laws of the locations they operate in. Personally I’m wondering what kind of Internet posts are restricted in Turkey? Who has laws to say you can, or cannot say things on the Internet? Besides… I guess, China, and obviously illegal things like CP…

Were they posting CP?

IDK, I’ve never used bluesky. I barely used xitter, back when it was relevant, if I were to use anything as a replacement it would be Mastodon.

Anyways.